Sep
4
Sebald’s “Ephemeral Wish”
Filed Under Nonfiction, Fiction |
Last year, I had the good fortune of moderating a panel on W. G. Sebald, in commemoration of the fifth anniversary of his death. The panelists were Mark Anderson, Professor at Columbia’s German Department, who is currently writing a biography of Sebald (an excerpt from which can be read here); Barbara Epler, the Editor-in-Chief at New Directions, who, as Sebald’s editor, brought his writing to American readers; and Professor Andreas Huyssen of Columbia’s German Department.
Given the time constraint, it goes without saying that we did not get to see many of the issues through to their conclusions. One of the most crucial questions of the night went unanswered: does Sebald’s pessimism offer us any hope An audience member brought up the question, and Professor Huyssen also brought up the point that one of the deficiencies that he saw in Sebald’s work was that there was not much of a utopian possibility offered through his art (I may not be paraphrasing him correctly here, but that was the gist). Professor Huyssen, of course, isn’t alone in this view; I’ve read other articles or critical works on Sebald that contain precisely such a sentiment. Many of my friends that I’d recommended Sebald to complained that they found the writing depressing, and had consequently quit reading.
As I mentioned, we ran out of time before we could give the issue its proper consideration. So is there hope in Sebald’s work If so, is it consolation enough, given the fact that the natural and political history that Sebald chronicles in his writing points toward a certain, inevitable destruction of mankind
It seems to me that one of the more creatively engaged works which addresses this topic is Eric Santner’s analysis of Sebald’s work, On Creaturely Life. What Santner does better than other critics in his book is describing/defining the uncanny world of “the undead” in which Sebald’s work usually takes place. Santner claims that Sebald’s prose works invoke “a dimension of undeadliness, the space between real and symbolic death… the ultimate domain of creaturely life.” It is Walter Benjamin, of course, who connected the notion of “creatureliness” with melancholy in Origins of German Tragic Drama, the very same kind of melancholy which permeates Sebald’s writing.
Santner seems entirely right to me, too, when he asserts that in such a domain of creaturely life, the logic of “petrified unrest” (Benjamin’s term) takes over. As many readers of Sebald will attest, a kind of a denaturalized caesura from reality takes a hold of a reader’s attention (many reviewers have described such an effect as a trance-like state). In such a state of “petrified unrest,” the small images and allegories that signify hope in Sebald’s work, to me, gain an undying radiance which transcends the duration and course of natural history.
One example of this is Sebald’s recurring image of salt crystals or minerals. In the opening chapter of Vertigo, Stendhal visits the underground galleries of the Hallein salt mines with Mme Gherardi. One of the miners presents Mme Gherardi with a twig encrusted with thousands of crystals, and Stendhal notes that the rays of the sun makes the twig glitter in a dazzling show:
The protracted crystallisation process, which had transformed the dead twig into a truly miraculous object, appeared to [Stendhal], by his own account, as an allegory for the growth of love in the salt mines of the soul.
This allegory of the dead twig’s transformation into a miraculous object of love is a central one, not only for Stendhal, but for Sebald also. Stendhal explains this allegory to Mme Gherardi, who does not care one bit, and of course, this process of salt’s crystallization is the very process by which love is born, according to Stendhal’s On Love. And near the end of Vertigo, just before the Sebald-narrator dreams of the Great Fire of London (an allegory for destruction if there is any), he dreams of seeing in the Alps a “myriad of quartz fragments [glimmering], as if the rocks, by a force deep inside them, were being dissolved into radiant light.”
The allegory of mineral crystallization appears again near the end of The Emigrants, when the Sebald-narrator visits the salt frames after viewing the neglected Jewish cemetery in Kissengen. At the salt frame, he closely examines the twigs at the pumping station. He is “completely taken aback… by the steady mineral transformation wrought upon the twigs by the ceaseless flow of the water,” and not unlike Stendhal in Vertigo, Sebald ruminates about
the impenetrable process which, as the concentration of salts increases in the water, produces the very strangest of petrified or crystallized forms, imitating the growth patterns of Nature even as it is being dissolved.
What can we make of this allegory of crystallisation and crystallized forms which dazzle us even as they are being dissolved How much of the allegory can we interpret as the “growth of love in the salt mines of the soul,” as Stendhal puts it One thing is for certain. Even at the precipice before destruction, Sebald’s crystals arrest the reader’s attention; the narrator’s (and the reader’s) knowledge of their pending, inevitable dissolution only heightens their uncanny brilliance.
In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald contemplates Sir Thomas Browne’s Quincunx - the quadrilateral, crystalline structure that Browne claimed to have found in every animate and inanimate object. In it, Browne said one can glimpse the reflection of eternity in transient Nature, the perfection of God’s design. It is not difficult for me to imagine Sebald’s deep affinity for Browne, and I can almost imagine Sebald as Browne’s secular literary progeny when I read:
one might demonstrate ad infinitum the elegant geometrical designs of Nature; however - thus, with a fine turn of phrase and image, [Browne] concludes his treatise - the constellation of the Hyades, the Quincunx of Heaven, is already sinking beneath the horizon, and so ’tis time to close the five ports of knowledge.
So: what about hope? In his essay on Peter Weiss in On the Natural History of Destruction, Sebald writes that Weiss’s work is “an expression of ephemeral wish for redemption, expression of the will to be on the side of the victims at the end of time.” I find such a hope, an “ephemeral wish for redemption,” also expressed through Sebald’s own writing, and in his crystals, a fleeting glimmer of the promise of such redemption. Is that hope enough? It’s really more than enough for me.
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